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Widely recognized for its historical significance, the Montgomery bus boycott is understudied as a rhetorical phenomenon. This essay analyzes the protest's first oration, King's Holt Street Address, arguing that the text interacts with a rich discursive field, interprets that field to unify the black community and constrain its modes of protest, and anticipates a metaphysical foundation in King's philosophy of nonviolence. Although King's "interpretive persuasion" was instrumental in the boycott's success, it also effaced the protest's gender and class tensions.
I did not get on the bus to get arrested; I got on the bus to go home.... I had no idea that history was being made. I was just tired of giving in.
Rosa Parks
On December 1,1955, Rosa Parks left her cramped workspace in the basement of the Montgomery Fair department store and headed home. She first went into Lee's Cut-Rate Drugstore to purchase some Christmas presents, aspirin, toothpaste, and other household items. On the bus, she sat down behind a small placard or "race sign" and placed her bags on her lap because her row was full. After several stops, the bus's whites-only section also filled, and one European-American man remained standing in the aisle. The bus driver, James F. Blake, turned to look at the people in Parks's row and commanded, "Move y'all, I want those two seats." Parks and her seatmates ignored or pretended not to hear the driver. Blake then said, "Ya'll better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." Three of the four riders stood up and moved slowly to the back, but Parks remained. Twelve years earlier the same bus driver had thrown her off a bus when she refused to exit the front door and re-enter at the rear, because the back section was full. Now, with no other seat available to her, Parks made a decision-she would not move of her own free will. Blake walked to where Parks sat, looked down, and said, "Are you going to stand up?" "No," she replied. "Well, I'm going to have you arrested," to which Parks said quietly, almost to herself, "You may do that."1
Rosa Parks's brave act is legendary, and she is an icon of U.S. history. In 1996, the Clinton...